I saw this Wall Street Journal on Modern-day Text Adventures on Slashdot.
That brings me back – way back – to 1979 and the computer clusters at the University of New Hampshire. Someone had installed ADVENT on the DEC-10s – that’s what we called Crowthers’ “Collosal Cave” adventure.
To say that changed my life would be understating things. It sparked an interest in programming that destroyed my chance of happiness at electrical engineering. I wanted to write games like that. And I did – HOUSE (a fantasy game set around my Concord home), TG2 (The Game 2 [sigh]), ROOM (a dungeon crawl with ANSI graphics that presaged my introduction to Rogue-like games, my contributions to Nethack…
WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED. This is NOT how my life was supposed to go. I should have been there, in the games industry, from the start. I had a dream, I had something I would willingly have devoted my life to.
Some entry-level $15/hour job doing data entry, tech support and light illustration – this isn’t what I was meant for at age 44.
I had skills. I had dreams. And now instead of making the games people play, I play them and think of what might have been.
I wrote games for Sony’s Magic Link. Why didn’t I build on that. WHY. They weren’t great games, but they were games. When Sony failed, I just let myself adrift on the tides of life and ended up at Archipelago. Nice people, fun job, but entirely away from my life goals.
I am TIRED of not taking control of my own destiny.
WHY can’t I do this.
